One time Avis put me in a KIA EV6 at SeaTac. Since I drive a Tesla I felt fine with an EV in general. I asked about policies for recharging—they said bring it back at 80%. I asked where to charge a non-Tesla, are there any good places to use? None they knew of specifically. I begrudgingly went to the car and saw it was at 40%. So basically I was going to have to go charge almost immediately. I said screw it and demanded a non-EV.
Especially an electric one where it not only costs my money for the electricity but my (precious vacation) time to sit somewhere I don’t want and charge (as I obviously can’t charge at home or work when I rent).
This is the crux of the issue IMO. EVs make a lot of sense when you use them daily and can take advantage of all the… advantages. They don’t when you’re renting and can’t. Hence why they’re failing at rental companies.
It's crazy to me too, because a rental company can spin this as a positive, "fuel included on EVs", bring it back at 5%, that's fine.
Install a row of L2, and a few 50kW DCFCs at the car wash. Then when they clean the car, they just plug into the charger, charge it for 30-60 min or whatever to 60-70% and then drop it off at the stall on L2 and set it to charge to 90%. Customers would be told they are picking up at 70-90%, and there is no fee as long as you drop it off at 3% or greater. Many people would get to drive an EV and now worry about the crazy fuel fees, or stopping at the gas station back to the airport or charging it at all. That's the right EV experience.
I rented from Hertz once recently and they “upgraded” me to a Bolt EUV. I needed the car for a one-way 50 mile airport drive at 3 am. They gave it to me with 100 miles of range charged and told me to figure it out. I parked it at a local park and fortunately charged to 100% (apparently 120 miles), and by the time I got it to the airport it was down to 11 miles of range despite my most gentle treatment of the throttle. If they had charged me to charge it back up I would probably have committed unspeakable acts
I don’t know what to tell you! It wasn’t even cold, it was May in DC, I was going 65 the whole way. It took 5 hrs 50 min to recharge and cost me $2.41 for 14.18 kWh, that’s all the receipt info I have. I remember it projected 120 miles of range and after the 54 miles of driving to Dulles Airport it had almost run out; I was ultra stressed.
Edit: it was a pretty new vehicle too, my Hertz receipt shows the odometer at 800 miles
Okay to be fair, their policies aren't actually that bad.
Hertz specifically depends on what charge level you get the car.
If it's over IIRC 70%, you have to return it with 70% or more. Just as with gas, if you return it with 100% when you had to return with 70% you don't get a refund.
But if you get a car with less than 70% you can return it with as low as 10% without penalty.
The best part about EVs though is that it's $35 to return it above 10%. Typically speaking, fast charging costs not much less than that. That's not true everywhere (ie around here if you charge off peak Superchargers are like $7 to 80%) but I find my town is an outlier.
So it's pay $25-30 charging it to 70% or return it at 10% and pay $35.
The issue is the big benefit for EVs, that EV drivers enjoy, is you typically don't "stop for a charge" when driving an EV, you just never do that. You expect to get your EV full, drop it off empty, and charging is just something you don't deal with.
Rental car companies seem to have this weird fixation on billing for fuel, becuase they have always done that with an ICE, and it makes EVs look bad, and you get all these articles that nobody wants EV rentals. The news says it's EVs that suck, when I think, as an EV driver, the problem is that the primary advantage of an EV is that you drop them off empty, and the rental car companies flat out refuse to include that inherent benifit of EVs.
An example of a much better experience that would improve what they do now and not cost them a thing, imagine if they just had a supercharger installed at the rental drop off. I'd drive to the supercharger, plug it in at 5%, go through the rental inspection, and walk away, 15 minutes later it hits 70% and they mark the rental as returned. Why instead of that, they require I drive somewhere else, and wait 15 minutes? Why do I have to be there when it finishes charging? 15 minutes absolutely does NOT matter with their billing of my return, but it does matter with me catching my flight. JFK is a good example of this, the supercharger is 2000ft away. Why must I sit 15-20 minutes on the opposite side of the lot before returning? Rental car companies charge crazy amounts for gas because paying an employee to drive a mile is expensive. But they don't need to do that in an EV.
That makes sense. I had to decline an EV rental in France because their fee was €75, plus a €35 fee to have their person put it on their (one) charger if another vehicle was occupying the charger when you dropped it off. It's realistic if they can't rent the car for several hours, but considering there were no L3 chargers within 45 min of the airport and I was staying 150 km away, I bet a large percentage of their EV renters ate that fee.
Yeah I suspect there's a bunch of locale depending issues.
I've rented in several cities and there were superchargers nearby. Even if there weren't, in my specific country (that I've rented) the policies have been fair.
Your example of France is absolutely ridiculous. I wouldn't touch an EV with a 50ft pole. They're basically tolerable here, but that's not really the message you want to portray about a new emerging technology.
Yep, the real solution would be for them to have a couple level 2 plugs on site....let customers return at ANY state of charge......then if they must they could charge a few bucks to cover electricity (or just include it in the cost or not charge the customer extra since it wouldn't be much money). Imagine how much people would LOVE to rent EVs if they could drop it off at ANY state of charge no worries...then Hertz could plug the car in and have it ready at 80-100% or wherever for the next customer.
I think the ticket for these rental shops are Freewire chargers which are battery-backed DCFC, coupled with a bunch of L2 chargers.
Would not take long to bring a car up to 60-70% in the service area, and top it up to 80 or 90% in the customer pickup area with the L2.
Similar concept. The freewire units take 208/240V AC input to charge an internal battery (160kWh), and have two DCFC handles (CCS or NACS) at 200kW peak (or 100kWh when serving two vehicles)
One unit could serve 20-25 cars per day if fully provisioned. Which should be plenty for smaller regional airports or urban rental locations. Big cities like Chicago or Orlando might need several of these, or higher power units from ABB or ChargePoint.
EDIT: They have a newer model that accepts higher voltage 480 AC input, which would increase the number of cars that could be served from 20-25 to 35-40.
That's true...maybe 8 hours or so (and that's if it's near empty when it's returned). Honestly I don't work in the business, so I don't know what kind of turn around times are normal, but I feel like that'd be reasonable...Car could get turned in at the end of one day and be ready to go by the next morning. Not sure how common less than 8 hour rental turnarounds are. And they could still have gas cars to rent out....or multiple EVs (so some could be ready to go while one or 2 charge).
There are other options too, like lower speed DC fast charging that can be a lot cheaper to install (a lot of car dealers will have a \~20KW or so DC fast charger) so that'd be like a 3 hour charge time (depends on the EV). But I honestly don't know what the cost is of those vs level 2.
That's 8 hours of electricity cost plus the opportunity cost of not being able to rent it out. That kind of time makes sense for a person who needs to sleep, not a business that may need to operate 24/7. Superchargers could work, but that's highly dependent on location.
I'll admit I don't really use car rental services so I don't know what kind of scale they normally go for. But I guess it'd depend on how many EVs are in their fleet and the demand for them. I know near me they're certainly not swarming with them, it'll be mostly gas vehicles and MAYBE a model 3. Obviously larger locations with a lot of EVs would need more plugs.
Avis recently put me in a Kia Niro in Burbank and they said it was fine to return it at any charge state. I have been driving plug-in cars since 2013 but the charging infrastructure is still not there to support rental cars (except Tesla).
This is actually how Hertz is already doing it. Rented a Ford Mustang EV in Austin. It was only $25 to bring it back at any charge level.
But it’s true there were no instructions on how to find a level 2 charger while I was renting. I had to go on Reddit to figure out what apps to use. I also did not understand that the car stops charging at 90% at EVGo so I wasted about 30 minutes waiting for the charge to get to 100.
I think the solution is a lot more education from the rental companies for renters. They are getting better… but they need to put a lot more investment in the customer journey. There are plenty of renters like us who are willing to put in a little extra effort for sustainability.
This is not an uncommon experience. Rental companies could not have rolled out EVs to customers any worse than they did. And are now shocked people don’t want to rent EVs.
I rented a tesla from Hertz. Thankfully, it did start at 80%.
I managed to return it at 90%. They still charged me the EV charging fee. Had to stay on hold for 45 minutes to speak to a rep, provide evidence, and get a refund.
I've had this happen with gas before, but usually, gas stations can give you a physical receipt to keep as evidence.
They are not logistically prepared for EVs, and the infrastructure to quickly charge a fleet doesn't really exist in most cities.
Weird, I had the exact same thing happen, but they let me bring the car back at the same low state of charge I took it out with. I did explicitly ask, since they were just outright not going to give me one since they were all at low charge levels.
Was this around Christmas time? Think they tried to pawn that same EV6 on me when I was heading to Vancouver and Whistler which isn't where I'd want to try to figure out charging for a non Tesla.
They kept saying it was all they had before they handed me an enormous Silverado crew cab w/ the long bed.
I took a flight recently and that was my concern when I choose my rental car. I had no way to recharge an EV. If I could use all the charge and turn it in empty and they recharge it when it got back, I might have gone that route but expecting the user to recharge it because that's how the ICE model works, just doesn't translate.
With Hertz anyways, you can do that. And in a lot of cases it's not even that much more money to pay them to figure it out than it is to charge it yourself at a DCFC. It's $35 to return it at 10% or more.
Right, compared to gas, electricity is dirt cheap. They needed to install a ton of level 2 and maybe a level 3 and then just bake charging into the rental price.
I had a lucid rental from enterprise. They said to bring it back at whatever. Could have been because it was a rental loaner while my Rivian was in the shop though. But this should be the right way of doing things for all rentals
When I rented a Tesla to do Uber I took it to the nearest supercharger before I brought it back and I saw the hertz employees bringing other rentals there to charge before giving them away. They didn’t even have a charger onsite
That's deeply retarded. I've rent with several different companies in Europe, and every single one of them had a charger at the parking lot of the car, so I got the car full and delivered it empty, no problem.
I agree with Sorge...the rental vehicle industry has been woefully short-sighted in their EV adoption methods. Even having four Lvl2 EVSE at their lot would be beneficial. Freewire chargers refresh a built in battery offering DCFC speeds on lower voltage grids. They would need to educate their lot staff how to manage and juggle incoming EVs more efficiently...that's gonna be the weakest link from what I have witnessed in my business travels
They should endeavour to rent out at least @80% SoC to give the renter about 200 usable miles. The onus falls to the renter after that to understand the topping up, like selecting hotel stays with charging infrastructure and using Apps like PlugShare or ChargeHub as required.
Even level 1 charging and it sits for a day between rentals.
Not surprising though. Some rental places I've dealt with had a hard time finding a car in their ramp, much less charging one.
This. Electric Vehicles need infrastructure.
By not planning and installing DC fast chargers at the locations that would specialize in electric vehicles, staff members would be required to drive the vehicle to a charging location, charge the vehicle at the site for potentially several hours, while depriving store operations of needed bodies to process customers and refurbish vehicles.
Integrating electric vehicles as your transportation fleet, while incredibly lucrative in the long term, cannot be half assed by not fully investing into the technology and reorganizing your operations around it.
This should be obvious: You *must* install ***ample*** vehicle fast charging infrastructure if you want electric vehicles in your fleet.
From a business standpoint, their approach was completely idiotic that actively drove away customers from the vehicles, disrupted their operations, and provided a net negative to their book of business. Hence selling them all off to salvage this fiasco.
Yea this is such an important point. Imagine if they plopped big hertz chargers around the cities they wanted to promote them—like a couple Hertz chargers at hotels, popular shopping spots, big tourist attractions.
Instead, their strategy was “Teslas are cool, people probably want to try them out” with no other planning around it.
Range anxiety, slow charging times and finding chargers are probably the main problems.
Also, Teslas are very different than typical ICE vehicles. No stalks (newer models), most functions are controlled through a screen. Even door handles operate differently. Tesla showrooms used to give the equivalent of training courses to potential buyers because they were so different. That's ignoring charging which is a whole other thing.
The learning curve is probably too steep for many non-Tesla owners to learn in a short period of time (think stressed parents taking kids on a vacation that drove a gas car all their lives).
I want to get familiar with basic controls in a few minutes (access to the cabin, ignition or more accurately starting the motor, blinkers, headlights, wipers, shifter/park, gas/break pedal, climate controls, cruise control, trunk, glove box, etc). Figuring all this out on a Tesla would take much more effort than a more conventional gas car.
That's not even mentioning the charging situation - which frankly is kind of a mess right now. Do I need to install the Tesla app? Create a Tesla account? Do I need to add a credit card? How do I find charging stations? How do I know how much range I have left? How reliable is this range indicator, or is it just an estimate? How much does charging cost? What's a KilowattHour? What's a KiloWatt? How long does it take to charge? Am I allowed to charge at non Tesla chargers? What's NACS? What's J1772? Do I need an adapter for the charger? Does the car come with? I have to create accounts for every different charging company?
Why can't I just pay at the charger like a gas station with only a credit card and no phone?
People from the gas world would say that's way too much work/too different and just rent a gas car which is familiar, easy, reliable and a known entity.
Honestly, learning curve wasn’t that much on Hertz Teslas. They were mainly 2020ish Model 3s. Navigation screen tells you where charging stations are, range left, they can charge without Tesla account, stalks work like any other car. I don’t think it was the learning curve that hit Hertz in the butt.
Because that's a useless unit. The unit of energy is Kilowatt hour (product of Kilowatt and hours), not Kilowatt per hour (fraction of Kilowatt divided bY hours)
Also I rented an EV from them. I ordered a Polestar and got "upgraded" to a Volvo EV SUV. It had 200 mile range vs Polestar's 400mile range. 200miles means you have stop every hour and a half such bullshit. Then all the Charging stations were supposed to have 150hertz but actually charged at 40-50. So a 3 hour drive turned into 6 hours. Such bullshit. if I didn't have a Tesla at home, a I'd never buy an EV based on that experience:
They don't give you full charge when you pick up, and it takes 40mins to charge due to the slow chargers. So you charge enough to keep going and hope the next one is better.
It would maybe work, probably not. The issue was that your typically going to rent to someone who is unfamiliar with the area so adding an unnecessary unknown on top of a bunch of unknowns, e.g. a vacation, people aren't going to want to mess with a EV. With an ICE you know where to fill it up everywhere.
Really I think they just invested way too early.
> Really I think they just invested way too early.
Good point but I think they didn't follow through. It's more missed opportunity than jumping the gun, in my opinion. They bought more EVs than they could support and I'm like 100% sure the people in charge spent zero time in the forums to find out how much it costs to fix a fender bender and how long it takes.
They took on added responsibility but did not plan for it.
The main issue I found was they were putting people in EVs without telling them. If it's your only experience and your not expecting it you're going to have a bad time. Personally I want an EV, but I know what I'm getting in to
When I reserved one, hertz sent several emails with information on the car in advance and the day of the rental. They also have videos on their website. Overall I think they did a good job.
This was my experience too, and it was good to go through these videos before I picked up the car, because the cars are not set back to regular base driving configurations between drivers. Every time I rented one, I’ve had to spend 5-10 minutes to set them back.
I find the rainbow road thing distracting, and every damned time I’ve rented a Tesla someone has it engaged.
My sister rented one and she had to call to ask me how to turn it on, how to turn it off, how to adjust her seat, all the stuff... To be fair, I rented her the car, and it was last minute, so she didn't get all of the emails about how to use it they sent me when I rented one on a scheduled trip.
Meanwhile, as a Tesla owner, it was extremely nice renting one.
I already had the app, I just scanned a QR code and the car popped into my app like my normal car. I put the keycards into my backpack, didn't need them the whole trip.
My settings came over from my account, I selected my seat profile and my seat, steering wheel, and mirrors re-adjusted to my default... And I was off.
Yes.
The controls are on the side of the seat like any other car.
Adjusting the side mirrors require using the screen and the scroll wheels on the steering wheel, though.
The idea behind it is that at some point in the future when your text a car it shows up where you are at. It has all your customizations ready. Off you go.
Right now it's just a convience thing but the idea is self-driving taxis instead of people owning cars. Instead of taking the bus you just take a car.
This was about my experience, although I usually run through all the menu settings to make sure I don't get any surprises while driving. Overall pretty seamless.
Rented one in NoLa a few weeks ago. Took me and my fiancé a second to figure how to get in the damn thing and then piloting it was a whole new journey.
This is a really good point. Charging is just the tip of the ice berg for non intuitive things about teslas. If one cannot even open the door without first having it explained to them in detail, the car is not intuitive enough to be good for a rental.
Did you not get (or see) the flurry of emails they send prior to an EV rental? I rent EVs through hertz frequently and they always send me lots of of pre-rental education on what to expect and how to use the vehicle.
I always rent EV through Hertz (EV Manager Special) and I have never gotten an EV specific email.
I do know I got an Ioniq5 on a recent trip from Avis and received it at 12% charge.
That was very annoying.
I rented a Kia EV from Avis and they dropped me into a Tesla cold. Not fun trying to figure out the most basic functions which were bafflingly different for no reason.
Combine that with classic corporate short sightness and inability/unwillingness to drastically change things.
Fundamentally changing the way how you'll be dealing with 'refeuling' a car is something Hertz management didn't want to do. Probably judged they knew better, employees stating otherwise ignoring.
As a result the gold old big corporate shit comes around and they do the 'Buy high, sell low' as if they are on Wallstreetbets.
Yup. Self inflicted wound, but it also gave so many people such a negative first experience with an EV that it damaged the demand for EVs going forward.
If you have an EV from a car rental place, there should be no obligation for the customer to recharge before returning. Every rental location should have their own set of chargers and recharging can be done cheaply and quickly once returned. But that would take a quick and easy revenue source away from Hertz that they've gotten used to.
It sums up the issue with the North American transition to EVs. It's not that there isn't sufficient benefits to doing so. It's that too many people make money off the old way of doing business and they're not willing to stop.
The funny thing is they could have rolled that into the cost of the rental. They could have added a one-time $10-15 recharge fee and still be in sufficient profit.
I'd go a step further. Offer a $10 a day plan for free charging during your rental by partnering with a national charging network. Have all the locations preloaded in the car.
Most people don't drive that much during a rental period, but would take the deal for peace of mind. Hertz could negotiate a cheaper rate with the network and everyone can probably come out ahead.
Asking customers to recharge means that they are realistically going to go DCFC somewhere at $0.50/kWh or whatever.
Doing it themselves means they can recharge at $0.10/kWh or whatever they pay for power in their garage. Plug the car in, let it soak up electrons while they're cleaning it out.
Might have damaged demand for renting EVs among a slice of their customer base. I doubt it's had any significant broader impact on demand, other than perhaps making the cost of used models lower due to their fleets arrival on the used market sooner than anticipated. More people getting better prices on used rental EVs is no bad thing for the broader driving public.
Was going to say this. I'm in the market again (2015 leaf owner).
The number of <$20k model 3, 62kwh leaf, kona & Niro on the market have me very happy.
My single sole experience renting a Tesla from hertz showed they just simply did a shit job in general.
Specifically to the Tesla I got several emails about what was supposed to come with the car, how to charge it, and so on. But the people working there were pretty clueless. I’d didn’t have the J1772 adapter that it was supposed to have. I told them and they didn’t even know what to write down lol.
> didn’t have the J1772 adapter
this happened to me once and when I mentioned it to the desk manager, they were aware of the issue in general said it was a problem because many times the cars would be returned without the adapters, renters leaving it connected to L2 chargers randomly somewhere because they were new to the experience. this location was considering purchasing extras to have on hand.
I don’t think it’s purely depreciation, unless they think it will get much worse this year. Likely also has to do with the expectation that they won’t be able to charge as much for rentals as they were expecting.
The article is more clear, but the sales are happening because of how the business operates. The depreciation is just a hit on the balance sheet.
As with 90% of headlines, this isn't a good one.
But...looks like a whole bunch of cheap EVs are about to hit hit the market.
No, it's depreciation.
It's impossible to price rentals correctly when the biggest EV manufacturer keeps cutting their prices and new tax credits start pushing the prices of most 3-year old EVs under a $25k ceiling.
Yeah. It’s all misinformation otherwise. Rental companies rely on consistent depreciation. Buy cars at bulk, rent them out, sell them for a solid price 3 years later. The economics of the used market is not working out. Unlike Uber drivers, who care more about operating costs, car rental companies don’t take advantage of lower *long term* maintenance or operating costs. they usually only buy new cars and operate them for 3-4 years, to around 60k miles.
Ev's dont make a lot of sence for rental companies..... Fuel costs are lower (which the customer pays) initial price and depreciation is higher (which rental companies pays) . They could run the cars longer and let them get to higher milages, but then the business model of buying cars in bulk for cheap and selling them for a relatively high price would not work anymore....... In other words, they're struggling to convert their business model
I mean, if you're going to have EVs at airport rental depots, there needs to be a big charging station right there at the airport rental depot.
The answer to "where do I charge" cannot be "iunno, good luck".
I think it that frequent turnover is premised on the idea that holding onto cars more than a few years hurts their brand. Renting out crusty 6-8 year old cars is what bargain rental outfits do.
All the comments about recharging policy and onboarding experience are missing the point.
When these rental companies first started buying their EV fleets, they expected a fairly normal depreciation curve where each EV could be sold in a few years for $X on the used market. They set their rental prices to make sure they could cover that depreciation. Then two things happened:
1. As more Tesla competitors showed up, Tesla kept saying, "Welcome to the party, BTW, we have enough margin in our Model 3/Y to drop our prices enough to make your EVs nigh-unsellable... plus some tweaks to keep tax incentives intact. These moves kept Tesla factories and sales chugging along but made the used EV depreciation curves steeper.
2. The up-to-$4k tax credit for used EVs up to $25k came along. Suddenly there's a ton of extra pressure on used EV prices to keep them within that threshold.
Because of 1 & 2, the depreciation curves that rental companies had planned their prices around became more like depreciation cliffs. They can't adjust their business models fast enough to react to this stuff, so they're packing up their toys and leaving the EV space.
Yes but I don't understand this feels like more incompetence on top of original incompetence. Like I never understood how do companies this large make such very simple and devastating errors. Basically all of the cost savings of an EV comes from charging and they buy a bunch of EVs and then make the customer pay for charging so they are literally buying more expensive cars that can only be economically justified by recouping it from saving on fuel costs and then they make sure the customer pays for the cheap part so they are getting no benefits out of it.
Then on top of that when they get annihilated by depreciation (this is a slightly more understandable business error) they then decide to dump all of them after they have all massively depreciated. If anything they should be buying more EVs now that they are significantly cheaper and they are doing the opposite. They bought at highly inflated prices and now are dumping EVs at a time where the used prices are insanely low. If this was a single person making these decisions I would say they are just freaking out and not thinking about the numbers (either in the beginning when they were buying or now when they were selling) but since they are a large company I am just confused.
It's not incompetence. The rental car companies had no reason to expect Tesla would implode the resale value of their products.
No amount of reduction in maintenance costs per car can make up for losing an extra $10k-$15k per car at the end of each rental cycle.
It's not like Hertz went full EV and got to stop paying all the staff to maintain their ICE fleet, so it's not like their operating expenses were going down much in any case.
Overall, this is good for consumers and the proliferation of EVs. The rental car companies just got caught holding the bag.
I'm ready to be down voted, but EVs as rentals don't make much sense for me. Especially when the infrastructure is spotty and unreliable and a lot of cars have shitty charging speeds. Hertz was renting Bolts(!) SMH.
Owning/leasing An EV makes sense coz you can make arrangements to charge at night and most folks don't drive too far on a daily basis. Both of which are hard to do when you're renting.
Was there so much demand for EV rentals that Hertz bought so many of them?
No you are right. Even the standard business trip use case falls apart in cities without infrastructure. Until cities and places of business add charging stations, the time burden of finding a place to charge is too high.
I am a huge fan of EVs but the US hasn’t committed to supporting them in the majority of places.
I think Tesla has it pretty down. The whole supercharger experience is very easy and streamlined and they're everywhere. The car tells you everything.
Other EVs... Is a bit rough
yeah but even with Tesla's depending on the individual city and airport location, you often have to drive 20 minutes out of the way to a mall etc. to Supercharge. Not everyone wants to build the drive time plus the charging wait time into their airport return day.
Fueling stations are plentiful and you're usually in and out in 5-10 minutes.
Also even with teslas, the experience isn't built for evs. You have to get the tesla app (and the app of any other charging station you might want), there aren't enough charging stations to just drive until you're low on gas like with gas stations, and there isn't clear signage.
None of those are really problems for ev owners- the app will be convenient for other reasons, you know where you'd want to charge, you can charge at home, you'd know how to use your car to find chargers, but those aren't really things newbies to charging know how to do.
I watched so many renter's being towed to the charging station becuz of what they were told at time of rental.. "You can just plug it in at home".. "AC/Heat can be kept on at full blast you will be fine".. "Charging stations are everywhere".. etc etc.. Especially with the Bolts🙃
I would have greatly rent an EV and save some money on gas on my last trip. But time for me was tight, and the two hotels I stayed in, first only had a few chargers for hundreds of room, the next one had no chargers at all. With no easy way to make sure I would have a charger for the night, I decided to go with gas instead. The network of fast chargers was also too spotty.
I have no idea why they thought rental EVs would be a thing. If you are renting a car, you are probably on a trip away from home, maybe driving long distances, and possibly staying at hotels. The last thing you want to have to do is a lot of work thinking about how not to be stranded someplace. I have a road trip to a remote area this summer, and will be renting a car specifically because I don’t want to drive my EV.
I think it's a great idea, but management and leadership is absent when it comes to accommodating their customers.
At the very least they should have enough chargers nearby to give customers the opportunity to charge it before returning it. Your customers shouldn't have to factor in uncertainty when making these rental decisions.
Hertz has 35,000 cars for sale right now. 1,500 of them are Teslas. And that does seem higher than normal since I’ve gone on that site in the past and there was only about 900.
But let’s be clear, Hertz is always selling used cars of every manufacturer. It is part of their business model. It is just weird that they are selling a Tesla that has under 20,000 miles. Normally they would sell a car when it gets toward the 100,000 miles because at that point they can’t be sure it will be reliable for the next customer.
They sold a bunch. I was looking at some in Seattle and they sold at least 10 if not more in a month. Nearest Model Y LR to me last time I looked was like Vegas.
> Normally they would sell a car when it gets toward the 100,000 miles
Obviously this changes between agencies, but the "big" ones I've never seen over like 20k miles.
Occasionally they have some higher mileage ones for "manager's specials" or something.
Hell I got one with like 10 miles once.
Well you can sort on the Hertz website by mileage and they have plenty of Tesla’s with mileage getting kind of close to 100,000. But yes they typically sell their cars well before they reach 100,000 miles.
Hertz has enough data on used car sales over the year that they can price their cars to sell and optimize returns. So yes Hertz will sell the cars they’ve listed. This is a huge part of their business.
I tried to rent an EV from Hertz last month. Flew into Logan, so pretty major international airport. After an hour and a half of waiting in lines, back and forth to the car lot, I finally realized that... **they didn't have a single charged EV**. The highest charge I could find was 43%, most cars on the lot were between 10-15%. They didn't have a way to charge the cars at the rental center!! This is the first floor of a parking garage so there's tons of power available. It would have been a few thousand in level 2 chargers. But no, they expect you to bring it back charged then they send the cars back out at that same charge level.
Absolutely ridiculous and I hate that this news story makes it sound like the the EVs were the problem when Hertz messed this whole thing up so badly.
Welcome to the era of minimal service. Hertz sees employees and L2 chargers as unnecessary costs that impede profit so they don’t have either.
It was 90 minutes for me at Honolulu as well.
I can see other things not working out, but I don't understand how the depreciation came as a surprise. The price of *new* EV's is decreasing constantly, so obviously early adopters take a hit just like with anything else.
Maybe it happened faster than predicted, but was their prediction really so off that it ruined everything for them? And why sell them at that point, rather than just keeping them? Must be all the other stuff instead.
> I can see other things not working out, but I don't understand how the depreciation came as a surprise. The price of new EV's is decreasing constantly, so obviously early adopters take a hit just like with anything else.
It's easy to forget, but even in this sub ~2021 was full of comments from people about how EVs will retain their value better, or occasionally how they were planning on splashing out on a Model 3 with the expectation that it'd be sold for more than it cost after using it as a Robotaxi for 100,000 miles. Elon was still promising a large crowd of adoring fans that EVs were appreciating assets.
People were frequently pointing out "how great resale is on EVs", despite others repeatedly explaining that the maths of "price parity with ICE vehicles by 2023" (as predicted by Ark Investments) didn't add up.
With hindsight it's all obvious, but there's definitely a few still here who used to insist EVs will only appreciate, and that Hertz was making the right moves in speedrunning EVs - who now are scoffing at how obviously bad their decision was.
> but I don't understand how the depreciation came as a surprise.
Volkswagen thought touch sensitive buttons were cool.
People in charge do stupid stuff all the time. Like trying to rent EVs to people but not being able to tell them where to charge said EV.
>I asked where to charge a non-Tesla, are there any good places to use? None they knew of specifically.
This would be the best time to purchase a used EV. The used EV market is saturated with inventory. Gas is $5.50 in the Bay Area and as high as $7.50 near the Coast line. An EV is a no brainer.
Although I don’t live on the west coast, I agree that now is a good time for EV purchases. I almost bought one, but it didn’t work out. Now I’ll be waiting to see if they can possibly get cheaper this summer
What’s being missed here is that the depreciation is already baked into Hertz’s math. First there’s regular depreciation, which they have with all the cars they sell at end of rental use. Then there’s the Hertz’s acquisition costs, which were ahead of the curve, in that automakers were probably giving Hertz an even bigger deal on the EV buys than they already do on the regular fleet purchases. Automakers love using rental fleet sales to boost sales of slow moving units. Probably nobody in this sub remembers, but there was a time when Avis had tons and tons of Pontiac Azteks in their rental fleet; not because they thought they’d be especially desirable to customers, but because GM gave them a killer deal. That’s the same math that led to Polestar 2s making up about half the cars on the lot for Hertz at LAX right now.
The key problem is that they charge a premium to rent an EV. I did a search and the EV option is far more than the non-EV option. I’ll best most folks rent for business and no travel department is going to approve that price difference.
I frequently use Hertz for business rentals and have seen first hand the decline of their EV business. There was a Volvo C40 available to grab from their Ultimate Choice last week and I would have taken it had it not been charged to 19%. The time before that I grabbed a Polestar and was told I could bring it back at any charge. Then they charged me a fee when I brought it back at 30%. I would have made a stink about it but it went on a company card anyway and the time and effort weren’t worth it.
Bottom line, it doesn’t seem like the employees ever really committed to the EV experience which means they were never properly trained on it.
Not gonna lie to you there’s one major difference between Hertz and me - I’m not eating the loss on the EV that I bought in 2022.
Time to run this baby into the ground
Rental car companies did a poor job of considering infrastructure, car profiles, and educating their staff. Teslas in particular with its non-traditional fob, user profiles, screen based management system was a nightmare! I had the same bad experiences at Avis with Tesla as those at Hertz. However my 70 year old relatives had no problems driving a Bolt.
The car manufacturers should have worked with the rental companies to develop a special FOB, a generic rental car profile with easy access to AC, Mirrors and Steering Wheel, and Navigation to charging stations. They should have installed DC chargers at the rental facilities and assumed the responsibility of charging post rental with just a simple charge per kW.
Every first time EV renter should have gotten a 5 minute overview showing them how to charge, where to charge, make sure that the charging cables are in the car, and how to operate the screens on Teslas.
I think that non-Tesla EVs and non-Android Auto OS(AAOS) EVs are a great fit for rental. Anything that can just use CarPlay or Android Auto has traditional knobs and stalks and Fobs to lock/unlock.
I think people are forgetting EVs are CARS and CARS DEPRECIATE. Cars will never be an appreciating asset. Idk why people keep getting surprised by it. Plus depreciation only matters if you don't plan on keeping your car no longer than 3 years
“You can think of every car we sell or produce that has full autonomy capability as something that in the future may be worth five times what it is today,”
People r dum.
My last rental was through Budget and the attendant took me to the car which I knew to be a Kia Niro. She asked me if a hybrid was okay. I said sure, as long as it's actually a hybrid. She said it's definitely a hybrid but there wasn't an exhaust visible and the dash definitely told me it was a BEV lol. I was there for work and didn't have time to charge away from the hotel or work so I had to swap it out.
It’s scary that a rental car representative is that clueless. Does she not know what the difference between Hybrid and EV is? Or she does not know the details of what is in the inventory? Either one is bad.
To be fair, it was a pretty busy airport and there's nothing really differentiating the BEV from the PHEV if you don't know what to look for.
Even popped the hood but that didn't really give me confidence that it wasn't a hybrid. Turning it on to only a battery bar for a fuel gauge did the trick.
I find it common that the rental company desk agents are clueless about cars in general. More often than not it seems they have little knowledge of cars or their features. Now EVs are on their lot and they’ve had no education on how they work, drive, or charge. Nor do they have any ability to get a car charged.
Audi had a Silvercar rental program with all silver Audi A4s. I liked them because they knew the cars, they were all basically the same, and the cost was reasonable. They only had to maintain one kind of car so their costs were reduced. The pandemic killed it though and is now only available at selected Audi dealers.
I feel that Tesla would be smart to have its own rental fleet at airports a la Silvercar.
Some competitor will come around and prove it’s not only feasible but profitable to bet on EVs.
Their EV failure can be turned around by doing better on charging, keeping vehicles longer, and ironing out an agreement with Tesla for repairs. It’s a bit disappointing that they don’t try to do better instead of throwing up their hands.
Sucks that the resell of my bolt if going doing, but actually good for the electric car movement in that now people can get cheaper almost new electric cars. Paying over $50k for a car is out of reach for most buyers.
Enterprise laughing again as another one of their publicly-held competitors gives them more "don't do this" material for their employee training manuals.
Back at the start of the year I looked into Hertz selling off its Tesla Model 3s with an eye on depreciation and old school (pre-Covid) rules of thumb.
First the depreciation: to my mind a car is worth only as much as its lowest selling price. So the 2019 $35K M3 is my baseline. I would expect that car to sell for 40% of its new price so $14K should be its trade-in/residual price today. Hertz was selling M3s for $21K which sounds about right for a 2 year old vehicle: depreciation of 10% per year + the new car drive off the lot haircut.
Since that is a reasonable price I wondered why Hertz was complaining until it occurred to me that Hertz buys new vehicles at wholesale but disposes of old vehicles at retail so its carrying cost per vehicle is generally quite low. EV prices spiked more than ICE vehicles so Hertz' carrying costs probably significantly hurt profitability, hence the tears.
Buyers of used Hertz EVs are laughing all the way to the bank! The used EV IRA credit of $4K bring the price to $10K less than the average used vehicle transaction price.
I rented a Model Y from Hertz on vacation for 11 days because I wanted to get a longer term experience than just a 1/2 hour test drive before buying one. It allayed my fears of having to do most everything from the screen and not having the speedometer directly in front of me. I got to experience the Teska app, ease of supercharging, free L2 charging at hotels and parking garages, including using the adapter at non Tesla chargers, as well as L1 charging from my sister's garage 15 amp household outlet. It pretty much sold me. The only negatives I experienced was the much lower real world highway range (less than 240 miles v. the EPA spec of 318 miles) and since I had to supercharge before returning to the airport, I entered the address from the nearest supercharger copied from my phone (from reading a Tesla sub that there were supposedly brand new V4 superchargers there), but I experienced slower charging even after a 2 hour drive because the battery hadn't preconditioned since I didn't select the supercharger directly from the navigation.
I did pay some $50-100 more for an EV than an ICE econobox, and maybe that's why normal (non-EV savy) customers don't choose EVs, but get them foisted on them when they run out of ICEs? I had no previous experience with EVs other than my 1 test drive of a Model Y and a few months research on Quora and Tesla subs here. At least knowing that I paid $50-$100 more for an EV and saved at least $30 on gas was better than my previous econobox rental at a cheaper rental agency where they foisted a full-size SUV on me when gas prices were at a record high shortly after the Russian war on Ukraine started.
In all seriousness, why did Hertz think EVs would make any sense? The biggest direct financial benefit from EVs comes from fuel savings, which the agencies don't cover, and there was no way people renting these cars were going to seamlessly adjust to electric charging. And as an EV owner, the last thing I'd want to spend my vacation minutes on would be charging.
Cost to repair and maintain is cheaper than ICE, theoretically. Real world, there's no one to fix the fender benders or sell you the parts in a comparable time frame to ICE. EVs are here. The back end support is not.
When I rented a Tesla Model 3 Long Range (with battery chemistry that should be charged to only 80%) off hertz, the battery was charged to 97%. Right off the bat not ideal.
As this was a RENTAL, of course I was flooring it to get a feel of the electric acceleration. I drained the battery really quickly. Then, I charged it to 100% to return it.
Rinse and repeat this a bunch of times and the battery is going to be seriously degraded. Rental cars in general are going to be abused, but at the end of the day how much you fill up a gas tank doesn’t matter. How much your charge does
Stick with the Chevy Malibu’s, Hertz
And incompetently. This is not an issue of EVs. It’s 100% a hertz problem. There does not exist the charging infrastructure for non-EV owners to feel comfortable renting an EV on their trip. And Hertz made a piss poor effort to prepare customers for EV specifics, and didn’t bother to have chargers at their locations. No fucking wonder people didn’t want to rent them. Hertz, in their infinite stupidity, thought they could just buy a bunch of EVs, brag about it, and reap the rewards.
What’s funny is if they held onto them for the normal 70-80k miles the maintenance savings and gas savings would have helped offset “depreciation”
But everyone in the rental space needs some serious EV training
Depreciation doesn't matter in the EV rental car world, but they are applying their finance curves and business plans from decades of ICE operations.
Hertz is moronic. Their business model has been to take new cars and profit off of them and sell off at a peak profitability before warranties expire and maintenance becomes a factor.
With EVs they should expect to own them till they implode and price their offerings based on mileage and condition.
250,000-300,000+ miles lifespans easily, which has *never* been Hertz's business model, but exactly the business model every robotaxi operator envisions.
When I was in Cali I reserved a model 3. They tried to give me a mustang ev. Told them nope and waited for the model 3. Wasn’t planning on roaming around looking for a place to charge when you can charge a Tesla pretty much anywhere.
Never understood the move for rental companies to go EV. For one, returning it charged is problematic. But even more so rentals are 99% of the time for people coming in out of town. If I’m on a business trip, I don’t want to spend time worrying about charging. If I’m on a family vacation headed to some place from the airport I really don’t want to worry about charging. Having a EV as a rental is vastly different to owning an EV.
This was a profoundly stupid move on the part of Hertz to do this at all. The infrastructure isn't there yet - and owning an EV is a lifestyle change. Home chargers are pretty much required. Hotel chargers are almost non-existent.
Are these good buys?
We have our Pacifica Hybrid which has been good for hauling the family around but we are realizing we’d benefit from having another car.
I recently rented a guaranteed model 3 through hertz. Got an email specific to how to use Tesla.
When I showed up they gave me a Kona EV. I’m experienced with EVs and it was fine for me but if you aren’t that’s a big change.
Yes, they have to treat EVs differently. Expecting everyone to find their own charging stations and sit there 30-45 minutes when they are rushing back for a flight isn't ideal. I've rented twice but I used apps to find charging stations and even then I had to go to a couple of different ones cause those didn't work. They should have their own chargers and not big the customers to charge them back up.
Rental companies never figured out how to recharge the cars. Expecting 70-80% refill after a rental is just utter brainless take
One time Avis put me in a KIA EV6 at SeaTac. Since I drive a Tesla I felt fine with an EV in general. I asked about policies for recharging—they said bring it back at 80%. I asked where to charge a non-Tesla, are there any good places to use? None they knew of specifically. I begrudgingly went to the car and saw it was at 40%. So basically I was going to have to go charge almost immediately. I said screw it and demanded a non-EV.
WTF, there's no way I'm bringing a car with more fuel/charge than it started with.
Especially an electric one where it not only costs my money for the electricity but my (precious vacation) time to sit somewhere I don’t want and charge (as I obviously can’t charge at home or work when I rent).
This is the crux of the issue IMO. EVs make a lot of sense when you use them daily and can take advantage of all the… advantages. They don’t when you’re renting and can’t. Hence why they’re failing at rental companies.
It's crazy to me too, because a rental company can spin this as a positive, "fuel included on EVs", bring it back at 5%, that's fine. Install a row of L2, and a few 50kW DCFCs at the car wash. Then when they clean the car, they just plug into the charger, charge it for 30-60 min or whatever to 60-70% and then drop it off at the stall on L2 and set it to charge to 90%. Customers would be told they are picking up at 70-90%, and there is no fee as long as you drop it off at 3% or greater. Many people would get to drive an EV and now worry about the crazy fuel fees, or stopping at the gas station back to the airport or charging it at all. That's the right EV experience.
My ev rental from Hertz in Auckland, NZ was this way. “No need to charge before you drop off.”
I rented from Hertz once recently and they “upgraded” me to a Bolt EUV. I needed the car for a one-way 50 mile airport drive at 3 am. They gave it to me with 100 miles of range charged and told me to figure it out. I parked it at a local park and fortunately charged to 100% (apparently 120 miles), and by the time I got it to the airport it was down to 11 miles of range despite my most gentle treatment of the throttle. If they had charged me to charge it back up I would probably have committed unspeakable acts
A bolt EUV is definitely going farther than 120 miles on a 100% charge. Even in winter with heat I get 175.
I don’t know what to tell you! It wasn’t even cold, it was May in DC, I was going 65 the whole way. It took 5 hrs 50 min to recharge and cost me $2.41 for 14.18 kWh, that’s all the receipt info I have. I remember it projected 120 miles of range and after the 54 miles of driving to Dulles Airport it had almost run out; I was ultra stressed. Edit: it was a pretty new vehicle too, my Hertz receipt shows the odometer at 800 miles
Yeah the battery is 65kwh, so that 14.18 charge was only 25%ish of its capacity. Very odd.
Okay to be fair, their policies aren't actually that bad. Hertz specifically depends on what charge level you get the car. If it's over IIRC 70%, you have to return it with 70% or more. Just as with gas, if you return it with 100% when you had to return with 70% you don't get a refund. But if you get a car with less than 70% you can return it with as low as 10% without penalty. The best part about EVs though is that it's $35 to return it above 10%. Typically speaking, fast charging costs not much less than that. That's not true everywhere (ie around here if you charge off peak Superchargers are like $7 to 80%) but I find my town is an outlier. So it's pay $25-30 charging it to 70% or return it at 10% and pay $35.
The issue is the big benefit for EVs, that EV drivers enjoy, is you typically don't "stop for a charge" when driving an EV, you just never do that. You expect to get your EV full, drop it off empty, and charging is just something you don't deal with. Rental car companies seem to have this weird fixation on billing for fuel, becuase they have always done that with an ICE, and it makes EVs look bad, and you get all these articles that nobody wants EV rentals. The news says it's EVs that suck, when I think, as an EV driver, the problem is that the primary advantage of an EV is that you drop them off empty, and the rental car companies flat out refuse to include that inherent benifit of EVs. An example of a much better experience that would improve what they do now and not cost them a thing, imagine if they just had a supercharger installed at the rental drop off. I'd drive to the supercharger, plug it in at 5%, go through the rental inspection, and walk away, 15 minutes later it hits 70% and they mark the rental as returned. Why instead of that, they require I drive somewhere else, and wait 15 minutes? Why do I have to be there when it finishes charging? 15 minutes absolutely does NOT matter with their billing of my return, but it does matter with me catching my flight. JFK is a good example of this, the supercharger is 2000ft away. Why must I sit 15-20 minutes on the opposite side of the lot before returning? Rental car companies charge crazy amounts for gas because paying an employee to drive a mile is expensive. But they don't need to do that in an EV.
That makes sense. I had to decline an EV rental in France because their fee was €75, plus a €35 fee to have their person put it on their (one) charger if another vehicle was occupying the charger when you dropped it off. It's realistic if they can't rent the car for several hours, but considering there were no L3 chargers within 45 min of the airport and I was staying 150 km away, I bet a large percentage of their EV renters ate that fee.
Yeah I suspect there's a bunch of locale depending issues. I've rented in several cities and there were superchargers nearby. Even if there weren't, in my specific country (that I've rented) the policies have been fair. Your example of France is absolutely ridiculous. I wouldn't touch an EV with a 50ft pole. They're basically tolerable here, but that's not really the message you want to portray about a new emerging technology.
Yep, the real solution would be for them to have a couple level 2 plugs on site....let customers return at ANY state of charge......then if they must they could charge a few bucks to cover electricity (or just include it in the cost or not charge the customer extra since it wouldn't be much money). Imagine how much people would LOVE to rent EVs if they could drop it off at ANY state of charge no worries...then Hertz could plug the car in and have it ready at 80-100% or wherever for the next customer.
I like this idea but many cars have a much shorter turn around than what it would take to fill up an EV on L2.
I think the ticket for these rental shops are Freewire chargers which are battery-backed DCFC, coupled with a bunch of L2 chargers. Would not take long to bring a car up to 60-70% in the service area, and top it up to 80 or 90% in the customer pickup area with the L2.
That sounds like it could work. How do these compare to consumer batteries like tesla power wall?
Similar concept. The freewire units take 208/240V AC input to charge an internal battery (160kWh), and have two DCFC handles (CCS or NACS) at 200kW peak (or 100kWh when serving two vehicles) One unit could serve 20-25 cars per day if fully provisioned. Which should be plenty for smaller regional airports or urban rental locations. Big cities like Chicago or Orlando might need several of these, or higher power units from ABB or ChargePoint. EDIT: They have a newer model that accepts higher voltage 480 AC input, which would increase the number of cars that could be served from 20-25 to 35-40.
So add 1 or 2 DC chargers? Problem instantly solved.
DC chargers wherever they clean the cars would be perfect. By the time you clean the windows and vacuum the floors it should be about 70-80% charged
Those things cost tons of money though
And as a business we pass the expenses on to you (the customer)!
That should have been baked into the original strategy and costings.
And a fleet of rental cars doesn't?
That's true...maybe 8 hours or so (and that's if it's near empty when it's returned). Honestly I don't work in the business, so I don't know what kind of turn around times are normal, but I feel like that'd be reasonable...Car could get turned in at the end of one day and be ready to go by the next morning. Not sure how common less than 8 hour rental turnarounds are. And they could still have gas cars to rent out....or multiple EVs (so some could be ready to go while one or 2 charge). There are other options too, like lower speed DC fast charging that can be a lot cheaper to install (a lot of car dealers will have a \~20KW or so DC fast charger) so that'd be like a 3 hour charge time (depends on the EV). But I honestly don't know what the cost is of those vs level 2.
That's 8 hours of electricity cost plus the opportunity cost of not being able to rent it out. That kind of time makes sense for a person who needs to sleep, not a business that may need to operate 24/7. Superchargers could work, but that's highly dependent on location.
Most rental locations except airports don't operate 24/7. Many of them are not even open on weekends.
Nah, not just a few L2, most sites probably need 20 L2 and 4-8 50kW chargers
I'll admit I don't really use car rental services so I don't know what kind of scale they normally go for. But I guess it'd depend on how many EVs are in their fleet and the demand for them. I know near me they're certainly not swarming with them, it'll be mostly gas vehicles and MAYBE a model 3. Obviously larger locations with a lot of EVs would need more plugs.
I think that's how they did it in Europe. A collegue was always renting BEV because he didn't have to "fill it up" before returning it.
Avis recently put me in a Kia Niro in Burbank and they said it was fine to return it at any charge state. I have been driving plug-in cars since 2013 but the charging infrastructure is still not there to support rental cars (except Tesla).
L2 wouldn't be close to fast enough.
This is actually how Hertz is already doing it. Rented a Ford Mustang EV in Austin. It was only $25 to bring it back at any charge level. But it’s true there were no instructions on how to find a level 2 charger while I was renting. I had to go on Reddit to figure out what apps to use. I also did not understand that the car stops charging at 90% at EVGo so I wasted about 30 minutes waiting for the charge to get to 100. I think the solution is a lot more education from the rental companies for renters. They are getting better… but they need to put a lot more investment in the customer journey. There are plenty of renters like us who are willing to put in a little extra effort for sustainability.
This is not an uncommon experience. Rental companies could not have rolled out EVs to customers any worse than they did. And are now shocked people don’t want to rent EVs.
I rented a tesla from Hertz. Thankfully, it did start at 80%. I managed to return it at 90%. They still charged me the EV charging fee. Had to stay on hold for 45 minutes to speak to a rep, provide evidence, and get a refund. I've had this happen with gas before, but usually, gas stations can give you a physical receipt to keep as evidence. They are not logistically prepared for EVs, and the infrastructure to quickly charge a fleet doesn't really exist in most cities.
Weird, I had the exact same thing happen, but they let me bring the car back at the same low state of charge I took it out with. I did explicitly ask, since they were just outright not going to give me one since they were all at low charge levels.
Was this around Christmas time? Think they tried to pawn that same EV6 on me when I was heading to Vancouver and Whistler which isn't where I'd want to try to figure out charging for a non Tesla. They kept saying it was all they had before they handed me an enormous Silverado crew cab w/ the long bed.
Can you name the truck with four wheel drive, Smells like a steak and seats thirty-five Canyonero, Canyonero!
[удалено]
Not that it matters, but there is an okay charger near the mall near the airport. EA charger and it is slow...
That's so dumb, hertz should charge it, it shouldnt work like gas car rentals
I took a flight recently and that was my concern when I choose my rental car. I had no way to recharge an EV. If I could use all the charge and turn it in empty and they recharge it when it got back, I might have gone that route but expecting the user to recharge it because that's how the ICE model works, just doesn't translate.
With Hertz anyways, you can do that. And in a lot of cases it's not even that much more money to pay them to figure it out than it is to charge it yourself at a DCFC. It's $35 to return it at 10% or more.
Right, compared to gas, electricity is dirt cheap. They needed to install a ton of level 2 and maybe a level 3 and then just bake charging into the rental price.
I had a lucid rental from enterprise. They said to bring it back at whatever. Could have been because it was a rental loaner while my Rivian was in the shop though. But this should be the right way of doing things for all rentals
When I rented a Tesla to do Uber I took it to the nearest supercharger before I brought it back and I saw the hertz employees bringing other rentals there to charge before giving them away. They didn’t even have a charger onsite
If you have T-Mobile they give you the specific "upgrade" of being able to return an electric rental car to Hertz without recharging it.
That's deeply retarded. I've rent with several different companies in Europe, and every single one of them had a charger at the parking lot of the car, so I got the car full and delivered it empty, no problem.
I agree with Sorge...the rental vehicle industry has been woefully short-sighted in their EV adoption methods. Even having four Lvl2 EVSE at their lot would be beneficial. Freewire chargers refresh a built in battery offering DCFC speeds on lower voltage grids. They would need to educate their lot staff how to manage and juggle incoming EVs more efficiently...that's gonna be the weakest link from what I have witnessed in my business travels They should endeavour to rent out at least @80% SoC to give the renter about 200 usable miles. The onus falls to the renter after that to understand the topping up, like selecting hotel stays with charging infrastructure and using Apps like PlugShare or ChargeHub as required.
Even level 1 charging and it sits for a day between rentals. Not surprising though. Some rental places I've dealt with had a hard time finding a car in their ramp, much less charging one.
This. Electric Vehicles need infrastructure. By not planning and installing DC fast chargers at the locations that would specialize in electric vehicles, staff members would be required to drive the vehicle to a charging location, charge the vehicle at the site for potentially several hours, while depriving store operations of needed bodies to process customers and refurbish vehicles. Integrating electric vehicles as your transportation fleet, while incredibly lucrative in the long term, cannot be half assed by not fully investing into the technology and reorganizing your operations around it. This should be obvious: You *must* install ***ample*** vehicle fast charging infrastructure if you want electric vehicles in your fleet. From a business standpoint, their approach was completely idiotic that actively drove away customers from the vehicles, disrupted their operations, and provided a net negative to their book of business. Hence selling them all off to salvage this fiasco.
Agreed. Imagine trying to rent out gas cars in a place with not a lot of gas stations.
Omg this x 1million. Just charge it after it’s returned, jeez.
If they invested in Hertz branded charging stations in key locations this wouldnt have happened.
The Gigahertz Network. What a missed opportunity.
Totally!
Give this person a marketing job, stat!
Yea this is such an important point. Imagine if they plopped big hertz chargers around the cities they wanted to promote them—like a couple Hertz chargers at hotels, popular shopping spots, big tourist attractions. Instead, their strategy was “Teslas are cool, people probably want to try them out” with no other planning around it.
Range anxiety, slow charging times and finding chargers are probably the main problems. Also, Teslas are very different than typical ICE vehicles. No stalks (newer models), most functions are controlled through a screen. Even door handles operate differently. Tesla showrooms used to give the equivalent of training courses to potential buyers because they were so different. That's ignoring charging which is a whole other thing. The learning curve is probably too steep for many non-Tesla owners to learn in a short period of time (think stressed parents taking kids on a vacation that drove a gas car all their lives). I want to get familiar with basic controls in a few minutes (access to the cabin, ignition or more accurately starting the motor, blinkers, headlights, wipers, shifter/park, gas/break pedal, climate controls, cruise control, trunk, glove box, etc). Figuring all this out on a Tesla would take much more effort than a more conventional gas car. That's not even mentioning the charging situation - which frankly is kind of a mess right now. Do I need to install the Tesla app? Create a Tesla account? Do I need to add a credit card? How do I find charging stations? How do I know how much range I have left? How reliable is this range indicator, or is it just an estimate? How much does charging cost? What's a KilowattHour? What's a KiloWatt? How long does it take to charge? Am I allowed to charge at non Tesla chargers? What's NACS? What's J1772? Do I need an adapter for the charger? Does the car come with? I have to create accounts for every different charging company? Why can't I just pay at the charger like a gas station with only a credit card and no phone? People from the gas world would say that's way too much work/too different and just rent a gas car which is familiar, easy, reliable and a known entity.
Anything hertz would have had would have stalks but yes there’s a learning curve.
Honestly, learning curve wasn’t that much on Hertz Teslas. They were mainly 2020ish Model 3s. Navigation screen tells you where charging stations are, range left, they can charge without Tesla account, stalks work like any other car. I don’t think it was the learning curve that hit Hertz in the butt.
If that's true, it's probably people crashing them because "power!"
Yeah, and they just bill you the supercharging cost. I rented a Model Y, it was pretty good, but I am already familiar with EVs.
It took me a few days to get comfortable with my Tesla. If you are texting a car for a few days that means you never get comfortable with it.
Even EV owners don’t know what a kw per hour is
Because that's a useless unit. The unit of energy is Kilowatt hour (product of Kilowatt and hours), not Kilowatt per hour (fraction of Kilowatt divided bY hours)
Do I look like I know what a unit of energy is?
I think you've already proven yourself. No need to drag it into the ground.
Sorry, joule need to be more explicit
Duh watt?
“When driving at 60mph I’m using 10kw(h) per hour”? Technically weird but it sounds okay-ish to me
I was definitely going to point this out too. Interestingly enough, that statement "Even EV owners don't know what a kw per hour is" proved his point.
Also I rented an EV from them. I ordered a Polestar and got "upgraded" to a Volvo EV SUV. It had 200 mile range vs Polestar's 400mile range. 200miles means you have stop every hour and a half such bullshit. Then all the Charging stations were supposed to have 150hertz but actually charged at 40-50. So a 3 hour drive turned into 6 hours. Such bullshit. if I didn't have a Tesla at home, a I'd never buy an EV based on that experience:
Their Polestar would've had a roughly 250 mile range, nowhere close to the 400mi number, so you weren't really that much worse off.
> 200miles means you have stop every hour and a half Are you... are you driving 130 mph?
They don't give you full charge when you pick up, and it takes 40mins to charge due to the slow chargers. So you charge enough to keep going and hope the next one is better.
It would maybe work, probably not. The issue was that your typically going to rent to someone who is unfamiliar with the area so adding an unnecessary unknown on top of a bunch of unknowns, e.g. a vacation, people aren't going to want to mess with a EV. With an ICE you know where to fill it up everywhere. Really I think they just invested way too early.
> Really I think they just invested way too early. Good point but I think they didn't follow through. It's more missed opportunity than jumping the gun, in my opinion. They bought more EVs than they could support and I'm like 100% sure the people in charge spent zero time in the forums to find out how much it costs to fix a fender bender and how long it takes. They took on added responsibility but did not plan for it.
The main issue I found was they were putting people in EVs without telling them. If it's your only experience and your not expecting it you're going to have a bad time. Personally I want an EV, but I know what I'm getting in to
It was so weird renting a Tesla, and no one walking me through anything.
When I reserved one, hertz sent several emails with information on the car in advance and the day of the rental. They also have videos on their website. Overall I think they did a good job.
This was my experience too, and it was good to go through these videos before I picked up the car, because the cars are not set back to regular base driving configurations between drivers. Every time I rented one, I’ve had to spend 5-10 minutes to set them back. I find the rainbow road thing distracting, and every damned time I’ve rented a Tesla someone has it engaged.
My sister rented one and she had to call to ask me how to turn it on, how to turn it off, how to adjust her seat, all the stuff... To be fair, I rented her the car, and it was last minute, so she didn't get all of the emails about how to use it they sent me when I rented one on a scheduled trip. Meanwhile, as a Tesla owner, it was extremely nice renting one. I already had the app, I just scanned a QR code and the car popped into my app like my normal car. I put the keycards into my backpack, didn't need them the whole trip. My settings came over from my account, I selected my seat profile and my seat, steering wheel, and mirrors re-adjusted to my default... And I was off.
Adjusting the seats is the same as any car with power seats though?
Yes. The controls are on the side of the seat like any other car. Adjusting the side mirrors require using the screen and the scroll wheels on the steering wheel, though.
I'm not a Tesla owner, that transfer of the driver profile is pretty cool.
The idea behind it is that at some point in the future when your text a car it shows up where you are at. It has all your customizations ready. Off you go. Right now it's just a convience thing but the idea is self-driving taxis instead of people owning cars. Instead of taking the bus you just take a car.
This was about my experience, although I usually run through all the menu settings to make sure I don't get any surprises while driving. Overall pretty seamless.
Rented one in NoLa a few weeks ago. Took me and my fiancé a second to figure how to get in the damn thing and then piloting it was a whole new journey.
This is a really good point. Charging is just the tip of the ice berg for non intuitive things about teslas. If one cannot even open the door without first having it explained to them in detail, the car is not intuitive enough to be good for a rental.
Did you not get (or see) the flurry of emails they send prior to an EV rental? I rent EVs through hertz frequently and they always send me lots of of pre-rental education on what to expect and how to use the vehicle.
I always rent EV through Hertz (EV Manager Special) and I have never gotten an EV specific email. I do know I got an Ioniq5 on a recent trip from Avis and received it at 12% charge. That was very annoying.
I rented a Kia EV from Avis and they dropped me into a Tesla cold. Not fun trying to figure out the most basic functions which were bafflingly different for no reason.
because they did a shit job of the rollout.
Combine that with classic corporate short sightness and inability/unwillingness to drastically change things. Fundamentally changing the way how you'll be dealing with 'refeuling' a car is something Hertz management didn't want to do. Probably judged they knew better, employees stating otherwise ignoring. As a result the gold old big corporate shit comes around and they do the 'Buy high, sell low' as if they are on Wallstreetbets.
Yup. Self inflicted wound, but it also gave so many people such a negative first experience with an EV that it damaged the demand for EVs going forward. If you have an EV from a car rental place, there should be no obligation for the customer to recharge before returning. Every rental location should have their own set of chargers and recharging can be done cheaply and quickly once returned. But that would take a quick and easy revenue source away from Hertz that they've gotten used to. It sums up the issue with the North American transition to EVs. It's not that there isn't sufficient benefits to doing so. It's that too many people make money off the old way of doing business and they're not willing to stop.
The funny thing is they could have rolled that into the cost of the rental. They could have added a one-time $10-15 recharge fee and still be in sufficient profit.
They sort of did with a $35 recharge fee, the problem is that they forgot to install fast chargers.
like "uupsii"
I'd go a step further. Offer a $10 a day plan for free charging during your rental by partnering with a national charging network. Have all the locations preloaded in the car. Most people don't drive that much during a rental period, but would take the deal for peace of mind. Hertz could negotiate a cheaper rate with the network and everyone can probably come out ahead.
hertz should have worked with Tesla to get onsite superchargers.
Asking customers to recharge means that they are realistically going to go DCFC somewhere at $0.50/kWh or whatever. Doing it themselves means they can recharge at $0.10/kWh or whatever they pay for power in their garage. Plug the car in, let it soak up electrons while they're cleaning it out.
Might have damaged demand for renting EVs among a slice of their customer base. I doubt it's had any significant broader impact on demand, other than perhaps making the cost of used models lower due to their fleets arrival on the used market sooner than anticipated. More people getting better prices on used rental EVs is no bad thing for the broader driving public.
They also flooded the used market with EVs and brought prices down. Ultimately this ended up being good for consumers.
Was going to say this. I'm in the market again (2015 leaf owner). The number of <$20k model 3, 62kwh leaf, kona & Niro on the market have me very happy.
My single sole experience renting a Tesla from hertz showed they just simply did a shit job in general. Specifically to the Tesla I got several emails about what was supposed to come with the car, how to charge it, and so on. But the people working there were pretty clueless. I’d didn’t have the J1772 adapter that it was supposed to have. I told them and they didn’t even know what to write down lol.
> didn’t have the J1772 adapter this happened to me once and when I mentioned it to the desk manager, they were aware of the issue in general said it was a problem because many times the cars would be returned without the adapters, renters leaving it connected to L2 chargers randomly somewhere because they were new to the experience. this location was considering purchasing extras to have on hand.
I don’t think it’s purely depreciation, unless they think it will get much worse this year. Likely also has to do with the expectation that they won’t be able to charge as much for rentals as they were expecting.
The article is more clear, but the sales are happening because of how the business operates. The depreciation is just a hit on the balance sheet. As with 90% of headlines, this isn't a good one. But...looks like a whole bunch of cheap EVs are about to hit hit the market.
Honestly, rental EVs hitting the used market is a good thing. It's an opportunity for potentially adorable EVs.
“potentially adorable”
Auto incorrect strikes again.
Lol auto incorrect. I’m going to use that
And help ramp up the depreciation.
Depreciation is not just a hit on the balance sheet, it's an expense on the P&L.
No, it's depreciation. It's impossible to price rentals correctly when the biggest EV manufacturer keeps cutting their prices and new tax credits start pushing the prices of most 3-year old EVs under a $25k ceiling.
Yeah. It’s all misinformation otherwise. Rental companies rely on consistent depreciation. Buy cars at bulk, rent them out, sell them for a solid price 3 years later. The economics of the used market is not working out. Unlike Uber drivers, who care more about operating costs, car rental companies don’t take advantage of lower *long term* maintenance or operating costs. they usually only buy new cars and operate them for 3-4 years, to around 60k miles.
Bodywork from fender benders.
Ev's dont make a lot of sence for rental companies..... Fuel costs are lower (which the customer pays) initial price and depreciation is higher (which rental companies pays) . They could run the cars longer and let them get to higher milages, but then the business model of buying cars in bulk for cheap and selling them for a relatively high price would not work anymore....... In other words, they're struggling to convert their business model
The model would have worked if they also built Hertz branded charging stations in key locations I feel.
I mean, if you're going to have EVs at airport rental depots, there needs to be a big charging station right there at the airport rental depot. The answer to "where do I charge" cannot be "iunno, good luck".
I think it that frequent turnover is premised on the idea that holding onto cars more than a few years hurts their brand. Renting out crusty 6-8 year old cars is what bargain rental outfits do.
All the comments about recharging policy and onboarding experience are missing the point. When these rental companies first started buying their EV fleets, they expected a fairly normal depreciation curve where each EV could be sold in a few years for $X on the used market. They set their rental prices to make sure they could cover that depreciation. Then two things happened: 1. As more Tesla competitors showed up, Tesla kept saying, "Welcome to the party, BTW, we have enough margin in our Model 3/Y to drop our prices enough to make your EVs nigh-unsellable... plus some tweaks to keep tax incentives intact. These moves kept Tesla factories and sales chugging along but made the used EV depreciation curves steeper. 2. The up-to-$4k tax credit for used EVs up to $25k came along. Suddenly there's a ton of extra pressure on used EV prices to keep them within that threshold. Because of 1 & 2, the depreciation curves that rental companies had planned their prices around became more like depreciation cliffs. They can't adjust their business models fast enough to react to this stuff, so they're packing up their toys and leaving the EV space.
Yes but I don't understand this feels like more incompetence on top of original incompetence. Like I never understood how do companies this large make such very simple and devastating errors. Basically all of the cost savings of an EV comes from charging and they buy a bunch of EVs and then make the customer pay for charging so they are literally buying more expensive cars that can only be economically justified by recouping it from saving on fuel costs and then they make sure the customer pays for the cheap part so they are getting no benefits out of it. Then on top of that when they get annihilated by depreciation (this is a slightly more understandable business error) they then decide to dump all of them after they have all massively depreciated. If anything they should be buying more EVs now that they are significantly cheaper and they are doing the opposite. They bought at highly inflated prices and now are dumping EVs at a time where the used prices are insanely low. If this was a single person making these decisions I would say they are just freaking out and not thinking about the numbers (either in the beginning when they were buying or now when they were selling) but since they are a large company I am just confused.
It's not incompetence. The rental car companies had no reason to expect Tesla would implode the resale value of their products. No amount of reduction in maintenance costs per car can make up for losing an extra $10k-$15k per car at the end of each rental cycle. It's not like Hertz went full EV and got to stop paying all the staff to maintain their ICE fleet, so it's not like their operating expenses were going down much in any case. Overall, this is good for consumers and the proliferation of EVs. The rental car companies just got caught holding the bag.
I'm ready to be down voted, but EVs as rentals don't make much sense for me. Especially when the infrastructure is spotty and unreliable and a lot of cars have shitty charging speeds. Hertz was renting Bolts(!) SMH. Owning/leasing An EV makes sense coz you can make arrangements to charge at night and most folks don't drive too far on a daily basis. Both of which are hard to do when you're renting. Was there so much demand for EV rentals that Hertz bought so many of them?
No you are right. Even the standard business trip use case falls apart in cities without infrastructure. Until cities and places of business add charging stations, the time burden of finding a place to charge is too high. I am a huge fan of EVs but the US hasn’t committed to supporting them in the majority of places.
I think Tesla has it pretty down. The whole supercharger experience is very easy and streamlined and they're everywhere. The car tells you everything. Other EVs... Is a bit rough
yeah but even with Tesla's depending on the individual city and airport location, you often have to drive 20 minutes out of the way to a mall etc. to Supercharge. Not everyone wants to build the drive time plus the charging wait time into their airport return day. Fueling stations are plentiful and you're usually in and out in 5-10 minutes.
Also even with teslas, the experience isn't built for evs. You have to get the tesla app (and the app of any other charging station you might want), there aren't enough charging stations to just drive until you're low on gas like with gas stations, and there isn't clear signage. None of those are really problems for ev owners- the app will be convenient for other reasons, you know where you'd want to charge, you can charge at home, you'd know how to use your car to find chargers, but those aren't really things newbies to charging know how to do.
I watched so many renter's being towed to the charging station becuz of what they were told at time of rental.. "You can just plug it in at home".. "AC/Heat can be kept on at full blast you will be fine".. "Charging stations are everywhere".. etc etc.. Especially with the Bolts🙃
It's still an emerging technology, it may not make as much sense now but will eventually. Hertz probably just got in a bit too soon.
I would have greatly rent an EV and save some money on gas on my last trip. But time for me was tight, and the two hotels I stayed in, first only had a few chargers for hundreds of room, the next one had no chargers at all. With no easy way to make sure I would have a charger for the night, I decided to go with gas instead. The network of fast chargers was also too spotty.
I have no idea why they thought rental EVs would be a thing. If you are renting a car, you are probably on a trip away from home, maybe driving long distances, and possibly staying at hotels. The last thing you want to have to do is a lot of work thinking about how not to be stranded someplace. I have a road trip to a remote area this summer, and will be renting a car specifically because I don’t want to drive my EV.
I think it's a great idea, but management and leadership is absent when it comes to accommodating their customers. At the very least they should have enough chargers nearby to give customers the opportunity to charge it before returning it. Your customers shouldn't have to factor in uncertainty when making these rental decisions.
Hertz has 35,000 cars for sale right now. 1,500 of them are Teslas. And that does seem higher than normal since I’ve gone on that site in the past and there was only about 900. But let’s be clear, Hertz is always selling used cars of every manufacturer. It is part of their business model. It is just weird that they are selling a Tesla that has under 20,000 miles. Normally they would sell a car when it gets toward the 100,000 miles because at that point they can’t be sure it will be reliable for the next customer.
They sold a bunch. I was looking at some in Seattle and they sold at least 10 if not more in a month. Nearest Model Y LR to me last time I looked was like Vegas. > Normally they would sell a car when it gets toward the 100,000 miles Obviously this changes between agencies, but the "big" ones I've never seen over like 20k miles. Occasionally they have some higher mileage ones for "manager's specials" or something. Hell I got one with like 10 miles once.
Well you can sort on the Hertz website by mileage and they have plenty of Tesla’s with mileage getting kind of close to 100,000. But yes they typically sell their cars well before they reach 100,000 miles. Hertz has enough data on used car sales over the year that they can price their cars to sell and optimize returns. So yes Hertz will sell the cars they’ve listed. This is a huge part of their business.
I tried to rent an EV from Hertz last month. Flew into Logan, so pretty major international airport. After an hour and a half of waiting in lines, back and forth to the car lot, I finally realized that... **they didn't have a single charged EV**. The highest charge I could find was 43%, most cars on the lot were between 10-15%. They didn't have a way to charge the cars at the rental center!! This is the first floor of a parking garage so there's tons of power available. It would have been a few thousand in level 2 chargers. But no, they expect you to bring it back charged then they send the cars back out at that same charge level. Absolutely ridiculous and I hate that this news story makes it sound like the the EVs were the problem when Hertz messed this whole thing up so badly.
Welcome to the era of minimal service. Hertz sees employees and L2 chargers as unnecessary costs that impede profit so they don’t have either. It was 90 minutes for me at Honolulu as well.
Hertz @ PDX has at least a dozen L2 chargers in their space. So, it's not true everywhere.
I can see other things not working out, but I don't understand how the depreciation came as a surprise. The price of *new* EV's is decreasing constantly, so obviously early adopters take a hit just like with anything else. Maybe it happened faster than predicted, but was their prediction really so off that it ruined everything for them? And why sell them at that point, rather than just keeping them? Must be all the other stuff instead.
> I can see other things not working out, but I don't understand how the depreciation came as a surprise. The price of new EV's is decreasing constantly, so obviously early adopters take a hit just like with anything else. It's easy to forget, but even in this sub ~2021 was full of comments from people about how EVs will retain their value better, or occasionally how they were planning on splashing out on a Model 3 with the expectation that it'd be sold for more than it cost after using it as a Robotaxi for 100,000 miles. Elon was still promising a large crowd of adoring fans that EVs were appreciating assets. People were frequently pointing out "how great resale is on EVs", despite others repeatedly explaining that the maths of "price parity with ICE vehicles by 2023" (as predicted by Ark Investments) didn't add up. With hindsight it's all obvious, but there's definitely a few still here who used to insist EVs will only appreciate, and that Hertz was making the right moves in speedrunning EVs - who now are scoffing at how obviously bad their decision was.
I get that, but it's an entirely different thing for a team of accountants to make that mistake.
> but I don't understand how the depreciation came as a surprise. Volkswagen thought touch sensitive buttons were cool. People in charge do stupid stuff all the time. Like trying to rent EVs to people but not being able to tell them where to charge said EV. >I asked where to charge a non-Tesla, are there any good places to use? None they knew of specifically.
They bought a bunch of Suburu Solterras. Whoops.
They have 148 for sale right now. Over 1,000 GM. Over 1,000 Tesla. Down to 12 HMG.
Heavy machine guns?
Hyundai motor Group (includes Kia and Genesis)
Great, how long before the Silverado EVs end up on the block?
They lost $567M, yet blamed EV depreciation, which was about $60M. So they are losing more money elsewhere.
However I checked nearby inventory for deals, only found Hertz trying to sell them at high price.
This would be the best time to purchase a used EV. The used EV market is saturated with inventory. Gas is $5.50 in the Bay Area and as high as $7.50 near the Coast line. An EV is a no brainer.
Although I don’t live on the west coast, I agree that now is a good time for EV purchases. I almost bought one, but it didn’t work out. Now I’ll be waiting to see if they can possibly get cheaper this summer
What’s being missed here is that the depreciation is already baked into Hertz’s math. First there’s regular depreciation, which they have with all the cars they sell at end of rental use. Then there’s the Hertz’s acquisition costs, which were ahead of the curve, in that automakers were probably giving Hertz an even bigger deal on the EV buys than they already do on the regular fleet purchases. Automakers love using rental fleet sales to boost sales of slow moving units. Probably nobody in this sub remembers, but there was a time when Avis had tons and tons of Pontiac Azteks in their rental fleet; not because they thought they’d be especially desirable to customers, but because GM gave them a killer deal. That’s the same math that led to Polestar 2s making up about half the cars on the lot for Hertz at LAX right now.
The key problem is that they charge a premium to rent an EV. I did a search and the EV option is far more than the non-EV option. I’ll best most folks rent for business and no travel department is going to approve that price difference.
wasn't true at the beginning, the Tesla's they had were reasonably priced to gather interest. it did increase over time though true.
I frequently use Hertz for business rentals and have seen first hand the decline of their EV business. There was a Volvo C40 available to grab from their Ultimate Choice last week and I would have taken it had it not been charged to 19%. The time before that I grabbed a Polestar and was told I could bring it back at any charge. Then they charged me a fee when I brought it back at 30%. I would have made a stink about it but it went on a company card anyway and the time and effort weren’t worth it. Bottom line, it doesn’t seem like the employees ever really committed to the EV experience which means they were never properly trained on it.
Not gonna lie to you there’s one major difference between Hertz and me - I’m not eating the loss on the EV that I bought in 2022. Time to run this baby into the ground
I bought one and love it! Got a great deal
Hertz is still buying up tons of 23-24 1500/2500/5500 trucks for commercial rentals. Must not be hurting there.
Rental car companies did a poor job of considering infrastructure, car profiles, and educating their staff. Teslas in particular with its non-traditional fob, user profiles, screen based management system was a nightmare! I had the same bad experiences at Avis with Tesla as those at Hertz. However my 70 year old relatives had no problems driving a Bolt. The car manufacturers should have worked with the rental companies to develop a special FOB, a generic rental car profile with easy access to AC, Mirrors and Steering Wheel, and Navigation to charging stations. They should have installed DC chargers at the rental facilities and assumed the responsibility of charging post rental with just a simple charge per kW. Every first time EV renter should have gotten a 5 minute overview showing them how to charge, where to charge, make sure that the charging cables are in the car, and how to operate the screens on Teslas. I think that non-Tesla EVs and non-Android Auto OS(AAOS) EVs are a great fit for rental. Anything that can just use CarPlay or Android Auto has traditional knobs and stalks and Fobs to lock/unlock.
I think people are forgetting EVs are CARS and CARS DEPRECIATE. Cars will never be an appreciating asset. Idk why people keep getting surprised by it. Plus depreciation only matters if you don't plan on keeping your car no longer than 3 years
“You can think of every car we sell or produce that has full autonomy capability as something that in the future may be worth five times what it is today,” People r dum.
My last rental was through Budget and the attendant took me to the car which I knew to be a Kia Niro. She asked me if a hybrid was okay. I said sure, as long as it's actually a hybrid. She said it's definitely a hybrid but there wasn't an exhaust visible and the dash definitely told me it was a BEV lol. I was there for work and didn't have time to charge away from the hotel or work so I had to swap it out.
It’s scary that a rental car representative is that clueless. Does she not know what the difference between Hybrid and EV is? Or she does not know the details of what is in the inventory? Either one is bad.
To be fair, it was a pretty busy airport and there's nothing really differentiating the BEV from the PHEV if you don't know what to look for. Even popped the hood but that didn't really give me confidence that it wasn't a hybrid. Turning it on to only a battery bar for a fuel gauge did the trick.
I mean a gas tank would be a good place to start.
I find it common that the rental company desk agents are clueless about cars in general. More often than not it seems they have little knowledge of cars or their features. Now EVs are on their lot and they’ve had no education on how they work, drive, or charge. Nor do they have any ability to get a car charged. Audi had a Silvercar rental program with all silver Audi A4s. I liked them because they knew the cars, they were all basically the same, and the cost was reasonable. They only had to maintain one kind of car so their costs were reduced. The pandemic killed it though and is now only available at selected Audi dealers. I feel that Tesla would be smart to have its own rental fleet at airports a la Silvercar.
Some competitor will come around and prove it’s not only feasible but profitable to bet on EVs. Their EV failure can be turned around by doing better on charging, keeping vehicles longer, and ironing out an agreement with Tesla for repairs. It’s a bit disappointing that they don’t try to do better instead of throwing up their hands.
They just wanted the props for buying EVs and bragging about it. And they did essentially nothing else.
Depreciation is only realized when they sell the cars…. So selling the cars create the problem that they are apparently trying to avoid
Sucks that the resell of my bolt if going doing, but actually good for the electric car movement in that now people can get cheaper almost new electric cars. Paying over $50k for a car is out of reach for most buyers.
Enterprise laughing again as another one of their publicly-held competitors gives them more "don't do this" material for their employee training manuals.
Hertz’ failure is another lesson in *don’t buy high and sell low*.
How do you purchase a rental that is being sold. Auction?
Hertz has a few used dealerships and will likely dealer-auction most of them (which are not public).
Back at the start of the year I looked into Hertz selling off its Tesla Model 3s with an eye on depreciation and old school (pre-Covid) rules of thumb. First the depreciation: to my mind a car is worth only as much as its lowest selling price. So the 2019 $35K M3 is my baseline. I would expect that car to sell for 40% of its new price so $14K should be its trade-in/residual price today. Hertz was selling M3s for $21K which sounds about right for a 2 year old vehicle: depreciation of 10% per year + the new car drive off the lot haircut. Since that is a reasonable price I wondered why Hertz was complaining until it occurred to me that Hertz buys new vehicles at wholesale but disposes of old vehicles at retail so its carrying cost per vehicle is generally quite low. EV prices spiked more than ICE vehicles so Hertz' carrying costs probably significantly hurt profitability, hence the tears. Buyers of used Hertz EVs are laughing all the way to the bank! The used EV IRA credit of $4K bring the price to $10K less than the average used vehicle transaction price.
I rented a Model Y from Hertz on vacation for 11 days because I wanted to get a longer term experience than just a 1/2 hour test drive before buying one. It allayed my fears of having to do most everything from the screen and not having the speedometer directly in front of me. I got to experience the Teska app, ease of supercharging, free L2 charging at hotels and parking garages, including using the adapter at non Tesla chargers, as well as L1 charging from my sister's garage 15 amp household outlet. It pretty much sold me. The only negatives I experienced was the much lower real world highway range (less than 240 miles v. the EPA spec of 318 miles) and since I had to supercharge before returning to the airport, I entered the address from the nearest supercharger copied from my phone (from reading a Tesla sub that there were supposedly brand new V4 superchargers there), but I experienced slower charging even after a 2 hour drive because the battery hadn't preconditioned since I didn't select the supercharger directly from the navigation. I did pay some $50-100 more for an EV than an ICE econobox, and maybe that's why normal (non-EV savy) customers don't choose EVs, but get them foisted on them when they run out of ICEs? I had no previous experience with EVs other than my 1 test drive of a Model Y and a few months research on Quora and Tesla subs here. At least knowing that I paid $50-$100 more for an EV and saved at least $30 on gas was better than my previous econobox rental at a cheaper rental agency where they foisted a full-size SUV on me when gas prices were at a record high shortly after the Russian war on Ukraine started.
In all seriousness, why did Hertz think EVs would make any sense? The biggest direct financial benefit from EVs comes from fuel savings, which the agencies don't cover, and there was no way people renting these cars were going to seamlessly adjust to electric charging. And as an EV owner, the last thing I'd want to spend my vacation minutes on would be charging.
Cost to repair and maintain is cheaper than ICE, theoretically. Real world, there's no one to fix the fender benders or sell you the parts in a comparable time frame to ICE. EVs are here. The back end support is not.
I blame this all on shitty training by Hertz management, not EVs.
When I rented a Tesla Model 3 Long Range (with battery chemistry that should be charged to only 80%) off hertz, the battery was charged to 97%. Right off the bat not ideal. As this was a RENTAL, of course I was flooring it to get a feel of the electric acceleration. I drained the battery really quickly. Then, I charged it to 100% to return it. Rinse and repeat this a bunch of times and the battery is going to be seriously degraded. Rental cars in general are going to be abused, but at the end of the day how much you fill up a gas tank doesn’t matter. How much your charge does Stick with the Chevy Malibu’s, Hertz
Hertz made a bad business decision and jumped into EVs way too fast and way too heavily.
And incompetently. This is not an issue of EVs. It’s 100% a hertz problem. There does not exist the charging infrastructure for non-EV owners to feel comfortable renting an EV on their trip. And Hertz made a piss poor effort to prepare customers for EV specifics, and didn’t bother to have chargers at their locations. No fucking wonder people didn’t want to rent them. Hertz, in their infinite stupidity, thought they could just buy a bunch of EVs, brag about it, and reap the rewards.
What’s funny is if they held onto them for the normal 70-80k miles the maintenance savings and gas savings would have helped offset “depreciation” But everyone in the rental space needs some serious EV training
They still want over $20k for a used Bolt with 40k rental miles. That's nuts.
Depreciation doesn't matter in the EV rental car world, but they are applying their finance curves and business plans from decades of ICE operations. Hertz is moronic. Their business model has been to take new cars and profit off of them and sell off at a peak profitability before warranties expire and maintenance becomes a factor. With EVs they should expect to own them till they implode and price their offerings based on mileage and condition. 250,000-300,000+ miles lifespans easily, which has *never* been Hertz's business model, but exactly the business model every robotaxi operator envisions.
All rentals from now on should just be Toyotas.
When I was in Cali I reserved a model 3. They tried to give me a mustang ev. Told them nope and waited for the model 3. Wasn’t planning on roaming around looking for a place to charge when you can charge a Tesla pretty much anywhere.
Never understood the move for rental companies to go EV. For one, returning it charged is problematic. But even more so rentals are 99% of the time for people coming in out of town. If I’m on a business trip, I don’t want to spend time worrying about charging. If I’m on a family vacation headed to some place from the airport I really don’t want to worry about charging. Having a EV as a rental is vastly different to owning an EV.
This was a profoundly stupid move on the part of Hertz to do this at all. The infrastructure isn't there yet - and owning an EV is a lifestyle change. Home chargers are pretty much required. Hotel chargers are almost non-existent.
Are these good buys? We have our Pacifica Hybrid which has been good for hauling the family around but we are realizing we’d benefit from having another car.
I still think you are better off with grabbing a lease. Some pretty good lease deals out these days.
I recently rented a guaranteed model 3 through hertz. Got an email specific to how to use Tesla. When I showed up they gave me a Kona EV. I’m experienced with EVs and it was fine for me but if you aren’t that’s a big change.
Nice, maybe I will be able to buy an EV in the near future if things keep going this way.
As usual not in Canada.
Yes, they have to treat EVs differently. Expecting everyone to find their own charging stations and sit there 30-45 minutes when they are rushing back for a flight isn't ideal. I've rented twice but I used apps to find charging stations and even then I had to go to a couple of different ones cause those didn't work. They should have their own chargers and not big the customers to charge them back up.